“Anatomy of a Fall” (2023)
2023 Palme d’Or winner.
Last year’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner is exquisitely set up in the first ten minutes before the film’s opening credits: “Sandra Voyter” (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed in her remote and isolated mountain top chalet by a young and somewhat impressionable student on her success as a writer. The interview soon becomes more of a lighthearted conversation, flirtatious even and full of engaging smiles, as Sandra admits to enjoying the company and a break from her distanced routine away from other human contact. Breaking the spell of a conversation that has now become far more focussed on the student than of Sandra comes an intensely loud and looping remix recording of a steel band rendition of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” from the upstairs of the chalet that forces an annoyed and clearly irritable Sandra to suspend the conversation to another day and bid the student goodbye.
Departing a vast chalet that is largely under reconstruction and surrounded in deep snow on the mountain hills on the outskirts of Grenoble is “Daniel Maleski” (Milo Machado Graner) and his beautifully attentive dog “Snoop”. Daniel is not yet a teenager and blind following a horrific accident when he was just four years of age and largely dependent upon his faithful friend as they traverse the ice and snow of their regular walks and escape from the confinement inside the chalet. Upon returning, Snoop dashes ahead of Daniel to find his father, and husband of Sandra, “Samuel Maleski” (Samuel Theis) lying in a pool of blood with a huge gash to the side of his forehead. Crying out and screaming for his mother, Sandra is seen almost immediately in the upper part of the chalet before rushing downstairs, calling for an ambulance and comforting her distressed young son.
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" - Volume 1
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" - All 7 Volumes
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" - Volume 7
Directed by Justine Triet (Sibyl, Victoria, Age of Panic) and co-written with Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall (or Anatomie d’une chute in the original French language) is a three language affair (French, English and German) which brilliantly adds yet more layers and masks to deliberately obfuscate the intense drama unfolding on the screen before you. The film is bathed in this to disorientate you and lead you to easy assumptions based on feelings rather facts, lazy conclusions rather than the truth and, to brilliantly confuse matters even further, uneasy feelings that your “feelings” and presumption of guilt may indeed be correct yet there is no catharsis, very little in the way of empathy, no-one to believe and no-one to cheer for.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves for “Anatomy of a Fall” is a truly stunning film with central narrative themes of regret, guilt, infidelity, envy, depression, righteous anger, repressed anger, the stealing of ideas, suspicion, marital breakdown and feelings of detachment, loss, being lost and a life lived in someone else’s shadow that can never be reclaimed or lived again.
And that’s just for starters.
At the time of writing the film has won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, two Golden Globes and a combined dirty dozen nominations for both this year’s BAFTA’s and Oscars and more wins will surely be forthcoming in the pun intended direction of Justine Triet and particularly for the stand out performance of Sandra Hüller. The performance of youngest cast member Milo Machado Graner grows deliberately and brilliantly stronger towards the denouement of the film and if there’s any pun unintended justice whatsoever both Swann Arlaud and Antoine Reinartz will be lavished praise for their individual performances on either side of this courtroom drama. Whereas Antoine Reinartz is superbly antagonistic and pugnacious as a French prosecutor, Swann Arlaud is sublime as Sandra’s defence lawyer but excels away from the courtroom with a performance full of yearning, discernment, compassion and much more that spoilers will not allow for disclosure! A brilliant performance as his eyes portray the window to his soul.
As you may have guessed by now I loved this film and it pips “Society of the Snow” for my favourite foreign language film of the year so far as well as being simply my favourite film seen so far in this calendar year.
Highly recommended.
Thanks for reading. A passionate fan and writer of spoiler free film reviews, please see my 7 volumes of “Essential Film Reviews Collection” linked in the middle of this article (all free to read if you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” package) and here are three of my most recently published film articles from well over 300 contained within my archives here: